THE FOURTH "R" - RIDING THE BUS

A chapter from Eulalia "Sister" Bourne's new Book "Nine Months is a Year"

Our friend, Mrs. King (wife of author-editor Frank M. King), when we met her during the rodeo at Tucson, mentioned the story in Little Cowpuncher about our "Gringos." She was so glad we published it because most people today have no idea that there are places in the United States where children still have to go through so much, just to go to school. Referring to the little Emerys who live far up in the mountains, she said, "To think that, young as they are, they must get up so early every school morning, get their own breakfasts, and walk a mile over rocks and cactus before 6 A.M., then ride two hours more on the bus. Why it isn't even daylight at 6 o'clock this time of year!"

I told her that even at school these three have burdens to bear. They are blondes among dark-skinned contemporaries who outnumber them. And they are small. One noon hour while I was writing afternoon lessons on the board I noticed Bill Emery hunting through the Book of Knowledge. I asked what he was looking for.

"I'm trying to find gringo," he said worriedly. "That's who they call me and I don't know what it means." One day I heard Jack Emery addressed by one of the big boys in this manner: "Hello, Jackass." It is surprising the extent to which children bear hardships without protest, even in America land of the free, where protest is not an unusual mode of communication. One morning I scolded Teddy because she was inattentive in class and didn't keep her marker on the place in her reading book. Mary, her oldest sister, came quietly to tell me that Teddy had been sick in the night. She had earache. She couldn't eat her breakfast, so they wanted her to stay at home. But when she began to cry and said she wasn't sick any more they let her come. She had not known how to defend herself, so she remained stoically calm except to jump, startled, when I raised my voice the third time she missed her turn.

Our western ranch children are used to hardships. Once, at Redington School, the Valdez six forgot to bring their lunch. When one of the older pupils told me about it I went out to round them up and take them to the teacherage for something to eat. Manuel, embarrassed, and annoyed, said: "I can stay two days without eating." He was nine years old.

The Baboquívari School bus riders have astonishing fortitude. Tonight I know how uncomfortable their daily journeys are, for I took them home this afternoon, and my car has more easy-riding gadgets than their old, rickety bus.

Pascual, our bus driver, broke his drive shaft this morning coming down from Las Delicias. When I turned off the highway toward Pozo Nuevo I overtook Edward and Bill Emery walking for help. We went back to Las Delicias to get Bill Ronstadt to tow Pascual into Tucson for repairs, and I brought

SISTER'S NEW BOOK: NINE MONTHS IS A YEAR

In our March issue, 1968, we introduced you to a remarkable person and a remarkable book. The book: WOMAN IN LEVI'S (U. of A. Press, 1967). The person: the book's author, Eulalia (Sister) Bourne, for over three decades a county and country school teacher in remote areas of Southern Arizona, and at the same time a struggling ranch woman. Her first book told about her life as a rancher, the warm-hearted, personal record of her homesteading years in Southern Arizona. But ranching was for pre-dawn, after dark, weekends, holidays and all summer. Five days a week, thirty-odd weeks a year, Sister left the cattle, the range, the well, and the pump to be a fulltime county school teacher, first at Redington, later in Altar Valley. In the forthcoming University of Arizona Press publication, NINE MONTHS IS A YEAR, Author Sister Bourne writes about the rural school kids she worked with and loved. In her own words her new book features "kids instead of cows."

Baboquivari School, scene of NINE MONTHS IS A YEAR, was located at Pozo Nuevo (literally the new well), on a big cattle ranch in the Altar Valley, fifty miles southwest of Tucson, near the Mexican border. From Redington to Baboquivari School with Sister came the school newspaper she started, THE LITTLE COWPUNCHER, in which the new horizons, rich variety, and just plain fun of schooldays with Sister were described by the kids in stories, poetry, and drawings.

Baboquivari School was one room in the ranch home of the chief vaquero, Pedro Aros, whose family of fifteen children contributed nine of the twenty-five pupils to Sister's classroom of grades one through eight.

In the chapter from the book which we present, Sister introduces those Baboquivari pupils who came from other ranches and rode to school every day on the bus. NINE MONTHS IS A YEAR is just coming off the presses and will be ready for distribution around November 1st. The price: $4.95. It can be purchased at select bookstores or can be ordered direct from the University of Arizona Press, Box 3398, College Station, Tucson, Arizona 85719. If you've ever attended a country school, or taught in one, or rode a bus to attend one, you'll enjoy Sister's new book. Good reading for everyone!... R.C. the children, clinging all over the car, inside and out, to school. This evening, after the seventy-two mile jog to deliver them and return, I am convinced that these children are paying high for their education.

It hadn't occurred to me that their endurance was extraordinary until, after a taste of their daily routine, I told them to write a "Complaint" column for Little Cowpuncher.

Indirectly, the idea came from Victor. We were recording weights, and noting the good results from the troublesome school lunches. Troublesome, indeed! Some trouble to Pascual who fires up my little cook stove and makes the cocoa each day, and trouble to me. I must do the shopping, advance the cash, make out accounts, and wait weeks for school officials to okay the triplicate invoices and authorize reimbursement. This, besides having my room crowded with groceries, and having to find time to make the sandwiches.

I reminded the ones on the underweight list that they must not let the extra food sandwiches, cookies, cocoa, and fruit take the place of their regular meals, for we wanted them to gain.

Ysidra, barred from the extra lunches by overweight, angrily told on Victor. She said he starved himself at home to get the good things at school.

"What about that, Victor?" I asked sternly.

His high-pitched voice could be heard all over the yard as he arose to say he did not eat the beans at home because Ysidra did not cook them "good." She didn't put salt! And when he protested, she put too much salt. For spite! The children all burst into laughter, except Ysidra. I held my composure, but the idea came to me that a page of "complaints" might go over well in Little Cowpuncher.

Mary, sweet Mary, couldn't think of anything in her life to complain about. When I suggested that few people would want to ride over her bus route twice a day sitting on a tin lunch pail, she was finally inspired.

At the end of our "gripe" pages, after all the pupils from the second grade through the eighth had expressed themselves on tattling, writing notes, teasing, unfair playing, daily rations, and anything else they wanted changed. Mary and Edward presented the plight of the bus riders.

Every morning I get up at 5 A.M. and ride from 6 till nearly nine. And in the afternoon from 3:30 till 6:00 P.M. on a 8 lbs. lard pail which sits between the front seats of my father's bus. Can you imagine how it feels?

Then I read in the car all the time as I ride. Nobody makes me do that but it is the only chance I have to read outside of school and I can't write lessons in the car because it wiggles and bumps. And as hard as it is for me I always read whole books, not skipping through them, and I never tell the teacher I have read a library book until I have read it through. Then there is always somebody who cheats and gets credit for books not read all the way through. I have complaints about these cheaters that wouldn't be fair to say in public. M.H.

My reasons for complaints about coming to school so far and early are something that nobody knows except the ones who are traveling. People think we have a good time riding. But it is a mistake. You feel sleepy, miserable, and cross. You get up at 5 o'clock every morning with hardly any appetite and still you have to eat because about after TO o'clock you feel hung hungry. If anyone wants to get tired of school let him try it. But even though we have a miserable life still I don't miss school. I always try to have a perfect attendance I wish one of these days the Government which is doing so much for some people would make all these roads better and the lives of some of us easier. It may be wrong to complain but never the less I give my opinion and have my freedom of speech. I know the Pima County School System is paying for a bus to take us who live far away to school to help us become educated citizens. - E.H.

From other chapters in "nine months is a year"

The all-day rain had melted the snow on the Baboquivaris, and we were stuck in the muddy roaring flood in the dip. It was my fault. To the right, where I should have been, not two feet from the tires' passway, there was a dropoff of about four feet deep. The swift, dark water shot over a low cement curbing and poured down into the lower stream bed with such force and clamor that I was scared, and veered left, skidded in the sticky red mud, and plunged into the dip where the flood had cut a twenty-inch jumpoff into the road. We screamed, the car settled, stalled, couldn't pull out. The water gurgled over the running boards. Taking off my boots (Edward is susceptible to pneumonia if he gets wet and cold) I reconnoitered. There was nothing to do but wait for a car to come along and tow us ashore. The nearest house was ten miles away. Darkness was less than two hours off. And it still rained.

Sometimes the little ones can't stay awake on the bus or during the long school day. When they put their heads down on their desks and sleep I won't let them be disturbed. Many afternoons when the first two grades are dismissed at two-thirty, I bed down seven-year-old Jack Emery in the back of my car. Once the bus left without him. He awoke in dismay to find me at the wheel dashing to catch them. But they had already missed him and were returning. His nine-year-old brother Bill was absent one day. It began to rain while they were standing out in the dawn waiting to be picked up. He ran back to the mining camp where his father had left the three of them about a mile above Pascual's little ranch. Jack and Inez Jane stood and took the rain until the bus came rather than miss school. When these young people come every day, in all kinds of weather, sick or well, it shows real interest. In this case I think it may be a feeling that they might miss something. With so many plans and projects our schedule is often variable. It depends on the weather and the general state of our health just what day we'll plunge into pottery-making, landscape painting, playwriting, dance practice, or track-meet drills. We never know when the county superintendent will arrive with a moving picture (powered by the motor of her car with a rear wheel jacked up) or a set of achievement tests. We always have a book going, and nobody wants to miss a chapter. I read aloud (dramatic readings with theatricals) immediately after lunch, an arrangement that gets the pupils promptly into their seats. And often there are grand projects such as the Hallowe'en Party, the Rodeo Parade, or the May Festival. Our attendance record is excellent.

Hardships notwithstanding, the older bus riders, especially, have outgrown their homes and need contacts that only school can give. I think, in particular, of Edward and Mary, two gifted young teenagers. It is not accurate to tag them "Mexican ranch children," when in the primary grades, they attended school in Los Angeles and in Tucson. Their ethnic distinction is that their mother's father was an Irishman from the Old Sod. But they subsist chiefly on frijoles and tortillas, live in a floor-less shack on their father's homestead, and are attending their fourth year in this isolated country school. The benefits they get from their present activities are appreciated. Mary said: "Edward and I are learning lots this year. My father asks us questions about the weather and the clouds and things like that when we are coming on the bus and he can see that we are learning very much."

At this, Socorro, who is shy about making mistakes when she wants to express herself in English, had a problem to present. "You know, Mrs. Bourne," she said, "My father does not believe that the rain comes from the ocean and the wind blows the clouds over here to us. He says he sees the clouds grow on the tops of mountains here. On the Santa Ritas he sees them grow."

We went into the matter as well as we could with the reference books at hand, using up our allotted time for history and physiology that day. In ranch country there is nothing as important as rain.

Edward is our Little Cowpuncher artist. He is talented and ambitious. He is dark-skinned, black-haired, slight of stature. I wondered about his name. Neighbors call him "Eduardo," his family call him "Lalo" (which the Aros boys sometimes reverse to "Lola" to tease him), but he wants to be called Edward. I have seen Edward develop from a clever-fingered boy who could make delicate wire baskets and cut freehand silhouettes to a self-confident artist sure of his ideas and their execution. To Edward as a developing artist school has meant above all opportunity such as Bill Ronstadt being brought in to give art lessons.

Edward has been a joyous surprise, for at first I didn't take to him. He seemed unruly because he never could keep quiet. Bill told me about the teacher who hit him across the nose with the sharp edge of a ruler. It could have put his eye out. I couldn't believe a teacher would hit a child in the face for nothing (later I heard that he had turned around to talk to the boy behind him). He was fourteen when I met him Licha and Tita even came to school every day while they had measles. It was seventyfive miles over bad roads (which were impassable in wet weather) to the doctor. Until they broke out Lavita and I, doing our best with her big doctor book, didn't know what they had. Tita was miserable with fever. I took her to the teacherage and gave her cold drinks and aspirin and a liquid diet. At noon I read to her and gave her an oral spelling lesson with a dark cloth covering her eyes. Licha was the next to come down. She was twelve then, my oldest pupil that year. Her father, our busdriver, carried her in to her desk from the pickup so sick she could not hold up her head. We both begged her to go home and go to bed. But she was a victim of my attendance propaganda and endured torment to keep from being counted absent. I doctored the two little girls, protected their eyes, and heard them answer "present" each day so that they both might be on the silver-dollar list at the close of the year. On Friday afternoon I made the hard journey to town for medicine and doctor's advice and got permission to shut down the school until the disease ceased ravaging. The girls recovered without permanent damage - and what a prize day we had at the end of the term!

and could no more be still than could a weathervane in a breeze. I accepted his compulsion to talk; it is seldom life's business to be still and quiet.

Plagued by his chatter the first day of school, I put him to figuring everybody's height and weight. It made a noise, but a legitimate noise. For several days I kept plying him with busy tasks. But I didn't suppress him. After the second week he began writing notes to me on the blackboard, usually, to my irritation, leaving out punctuation marks. In the morning when I turned to my special panel to put up the daily chart, I might find scrawled in a nice clean place: When are you going to have art? After lunch, may we draw today? would stare at me from the blackboard. I ignored these suggestions. I was struggling with the hardest class I'd ever had. No pupil except Mary could read. The school books might as well have been printed in Greek. Now let this impertinent boy try to read and learn history dates and fractions and high time!

But Edward didn't have long to wait to get his desire. For my five primary children, one morning I drew on the board with colored chalk a crude illustration of Little Boy Blue. I saw Edward quit his arithmetic and watch me as I struggled with the haystack and cornfield. At noon he slipped in and expertly worked over my picture.

"Edward, did you do that?"

"Yes, Ma'am."

"All right. Thank you. We're going to have art in this school."

This was a year before Bill Ronstadt married. Fortunately bachelors are often hungry. When I invited Bill to dinner I asked him to come early and teach drawing and painting while I made the casserole and the pie (our establishment had no icebox or refrigerator). Bill had never had young children under his direction. When I sat in on his classes I felt as if I were auditing a university lecture. He was wonderful with chalk and pencil, fluent with Spanish and a big success as a teacher. Edward, Mary, and Socorro did so well he thrilled to teach them.

And Edward was a problem no more. How versatile he is! Besides drawing and painting, he plays the piano by ear, sings tenor, writes stories, drives a car, rides a horse, is a good marksman, is student enough to do two grades in one year, and at home his father calls him his "right-handed man" (so what if he isn't still and quiet!). He gathers and cuts firewood, changes tires, and is the water-carrier up a steep slippery sixty-foot climb from the well in the canyon to the house on the hillside.

Even so, his father and the vaqueros tease him about his interest in art and his passion for nature study. He told me indignantly one morning as he handed me about a hundred long-stemmed pale violet covenas (picked while he kept the bus waiting) that Pascual called him "sissy" because he liked flowers. I told him about Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Burbank. He went right to the Books of Knowledge and looked them up.

Mary is younger than he, but ahead of him because he has had pneumonia twice. She is a short, plump girl with a pretty face and lovely hair which she hates without a permanent. Worried about her figure, she often starts her long, hard day without breakfast, and is careful to eat lightly at lunch. I tell her that the reason she has headaches is because of hunger. But I cannot deny that beans and tortillas are not slenderizing foods. She maintains that her headaches are caused by reading while the bus jiggles over the rough roads.

When can she read? At school she is busy all day. At home they make her go to bed early because she must get up at five o'clock. But she will read. I believe she is the only pupil I ever had who plodded through every page of Little Women. Last year she won our prize for reading the most library books. I am proud of the reader she has grown to be, and I like her stories, too. When she told how she spent her Thanksgiving vacation, for our December Little Cowpuncher, she divided the material into five parts. Part I was about Wednesday, the afternoon she went to town, always a thrill for her; Part II was Thursday when she attended her cousin's early morning church wedding and ate two Thanksgiving dinners. Then she wrote graphically of a ranch girl's experiences.

Part III. Friday That morning, in cleaning my cousin's house where we stayed, and packing to go back to the ranch, I went to sleep on everything I did. So I took my baby niece and put her to sleep and slept with her. When I awoke my aunt came with the exciting news my cousin from Los Angeles had come. After that visit we went to two houses to say goodby, and so it was dark when we came to the ranch. Then I had to make a fire and get supper and make tortillas. Imagine how I felt. I said to myself, I won't go to town any more because when I feel so tired from the long bumpy road, then I have to make a fire and make tortillas.

Part IV. Saturday We had to get up early again. Alas, the only days we might have slept a little late. For now on our holidays we had to go make a new road. Our neighbor closed the road we had been using. He told us he was going to use the land. So we had to pick and shovel and rake and roll big rocks. On that land there are rocks as high as our bus tires. We cut cactus, palo verdes, mesquites, and yerba del burro. It was hard work. I had some Levi's and put on an old hat so to not get burned. The next day my body felt just as if I had been riding a bronco horse.

Part V. Sunday Our last holiday passed also with the hard rough road work. I heartily wished it had been a schoolday even if I had to do arithmetic all day. It was the hardest work I have ever done in my life for we have been on the ranch not much over three years. But I did enjoy the two days in Tucson. M.H., Eighth Grade During the fall months we had for a few weeks (while their father did some assessment work on mining claims) the little Sanchez children. Prudencia, the eldest, in the third grade, wrote this account of her Thanksgiving celebration: "I stayed at home. I ate bread and potatoes and candy."

Contrast with that the feast at Palo Alto where Frances Salazar lives with her aunt and uncle who adore her, and indulge her: I ate turkey in the night of Thanksgiving. Lots of people came to my house and I invited Marcela to stay 2 days. F.S.

Frances is a happy little girl whose popularity and gaeity may stem partly from the fact that she is a natural honey blonde.

The bus picks her up about seven-thirty in front of the big house where her uncle is stationed as cowboy. Ysidra, fourth grade, who was a guest at the party wrote it up in this manner: I went to Palo Alto with my mother and the girls. And the big boys, Socorro and Frank christened Frances doll in the afternoon. When we got there Charlie, the uncle of Frances, killed the turkey and they took the feathers from it and cooked it. At 11:30 in the night we had supper and we drank cocoa. But they didn't have lots of cocoa. It was not enough for all the audience. Y.A. Fourth Grade.

Nobody was left at Pozo Nuevo that holiday but Pancho and the three youngest boys. Arturo wrote of their activities: Wednesday we had a Thanksgiving party at school. We were thankful because we had a perfect attendance for a whole month. We ate pickles and carrots and buns with wienies and pumpkin pie and candy. But Thursday on the day of Thanksgiving we did not have a good time because the girls and my mother and the big boys went to Palo Alto and left Pancho, Victor, Pili, and me alone at the ranch. We were not afraid of anybody that would harm us. To eat we made a sugar candy and ate many prunes." A.A. Fifth Grade The four Badilla children entered Baboquivari School this year, so they still seem like new pupils. But they gladly entered into our work and play, and shared our enthusiasm for baseball, singing, parading, making pottery, and publishing Little Cowpuncher. The aim is to have at least one story from each little cowpuncher every month. But when we were ready to go to press Herlinda had been left out. In last-minute panic I gave her a piece of scratch paper and said: "Write a story."

"What shall I write about?"

"Oh, write about yourself." She did.

MY OWN STORY

I am a little cowpuncher girl. I live in the Ronstadt Ranch near the Babouquívari Mountains. It is the Las Delicias Ranch. I eat Mexican food. Beans and tortillas and bread and milk because I am a Mexican girl. This week at our school Mrs. Ewing from Illinois and Mr. and Mrs. Ronstadt came to visit our school and we sang them many songs. -H. B. Sixth Grade.

Her sister, Dolores, called Lolita or Loli, is a special child. In school she seems like something from dream heaven, so I call her my angel. This amuses the other girls. We sing a lullaby the last line of which is "Angels will watch my darling." At that line Teddy and Chelo smile and point to Loli. She is a demure child with pale skin, dainty features, and soft waving hair shoulder length worn looped back with a ribbon. I like to hear her read, for the sweet throaty quality in her voice. I can't imagine scolding her. Perhaps her frail loveliness has something to do with valvular trouble in her heart; we have to be careful that she does not overdo. She won a prize for getting a hundred perfect lessons before anyone else in school. She is eight years old and has caught up, in school work, with her brother Lupe who is nine.

Lupe is a funny boy. Funny, without being rude or smarty. Everybody likes him and the children laugh at his antics without teasing him. In lessons he is slow but sure. He will not quit an assignment just because it is closing time. "Come on, Lupe! The bus is going!" "Wait me. I no finish my test."

There he stays, half-sitting, half-standing, writing in his big, clear letters until he answers all the questions that have been given him, and mostly with correct answers.

Luis, the oldest Badilla, is a slight boy of fourteen also a victim of chest trouble. But there is no occasion to call him angelic. I lose patience trying to get him to read the required number of library books. I scold him for his annoying habit of inciting giggling spasms among the Aros boys. Ramón has to move across the room from him to keep his composure. When the boys have their unsupervised baseball at noon, Luis, now forbidden by doctor's orders to be catcher (which he plays expertly), is umpire. Though thinly dressed, he never complains of the cold. He likes to ride the bus since he doesn't have to get up so early he lives only seven miles from school and insists on taking his share of opening gates and changing tires.

Bus riding, in spite of hardships, has its pleasant side in good weather. The children from lonely ranches enjoy the chance to gossip and play. Many times Mary or Herlinda reads aloud or tells stories to the younger ones; and Frances amuses them by translating into Spanish the stories they have heard at school. In warm weather Pascual leaves part of his load in charge of Mary and Edward in some pleasant spot along the road while he goes up a sideroad to Las Delicias, or to Peyron's for little Ester. Poor child. She is too frail and undernourished to bear up under school and bus riding. Every year she falls ill before attending school long enough to pass, so she is still in the first grade, although eight years old. While Pascual is gone, the waiting children pick flowers, eat covena bulbs, or practice for track meet or dances. Sometimes they have seen snakes or coyotes or skunks, but nothing bad has happened to them. And once in a while they get a thrill such as Edward described: A RARE THING THAT HAPPENED We were waiting by Cerro Prieto for the bus when right before our eyes stood a herd of blacktailed deer. They were about thirty - does, fawns, and bucks. They stood very tame looking at us. All the kids were excited, yelling "Deer! Deer! Deer!" That frightened them and they ran away leaving a cloud of dust. Е. Н. [Editor's note: Edward hesitated to publish this story. He was afraid some heartless hunters with no respect for lawful seasons might come and kill them. We waited until the deer had time to change ranges before printing it.] Pascual, our bus driver, has a sunny disposition despite his chronic parental grumblings and ceaseless chatter. A clerk in the county superintendent's office calls him Señor Muchos Palabras Mr. Many Words. His services to the school are not limited to driving the bus and signing vouchers as a trustee. He fires up the teacher's stove about II A.M. and makes the cocoa. He mends broken windows and screen doors, and at times takes a hand at yard duty. But his most valued service to the school and community is that of barber. He cuts hair for any and all and is in great demand before fiestas. One by one, after the grownup cowboys are shorn, my boys, and some of the girls, get excused from the schoolroom and run out to the backless chair under the tamarisk tree in the rear where Pascual talks and jokes and snips off locks all day long.

ETERNAL LIFE

Twenty dead men tell In Superstition Mountain Live tales of treasure.

ΤΟΥ

The Navajo child Played with a moonbeam that changed To a fox and fled.

DAWN

Mystic Hopi knife Carves dead dark to live shadows Leaping to color.

HUMANITARIAN

Mountain that perfect Needed some scars, so white clouds Slashed it with shadows.

SUNSET

Warclubs of darkness Pounded the peaceful prairies Till red pulp splattered.

DESERT STORM OF DEC. 15, 1967

Predictions, so I'm told, are made by fools. For nature knows to use the proper tools To summon, at her slightest whim, Elements which cause the sun to dim, And winds to rise blow across endless space; Bid winter strike with unseemly haste. Where before, there was only cactus and the sand, Now glistens white a winter wonderland!

FORECAST

When geese go riding on the moon, Winter will be coming soon; Black bears ball up into their fur Against the north wind's sepulcher; Rivers crawl beneath white spreads While fish sleep on their sandy beds, And trees with empty nests reach out To battle blizzards' icy bout.

Winter will be coming soon When geese go riding on the moon.

MONUMENT

Granite will tumble down and columns fall; A person builds his own memorial. Behind each statue, pyramid, and shrine Looms the reality that makes it fine. With simple words and ways each builds to thisLasting memorial, or edifice.

DESERT NIGHT

Rise, slow-paced moon And sweep the sky Of all the desert heat. Come welcome wind and Whisper, a lullaby To all the scurrying feet Of each small creature. And let the night, then, Pattern, a quilt of stars For all those who would sleep.

OLD FORT GRANT:

Your September, 1968, issue, takes me back over eighty years, when I was a boy at Fort Grant. The picture “Officers' row at old Fort Grant” was taken on my birthday anniversary, Jan. 31, 1888, and is a story in itself. The large quarters at the left is that of Col. Anson Mills, in command at that time. In front, outside of the fence, stands this writer Willie Corbusier and Constance Mills, the Colonel's daughter. Inside are seated my mother and Mrs. Mills. The second quarters are where we were “ranked out” for the first time and at the extreme right where we were again ranked out and occupied Brown's Folly (third from left) for a time and then back to #2, just beyond Lake Constance. On the tennis court, center, are two of my brothers. Standing between the buglers and the company at dress parade is Anson Mills, Jr. This picture is one of many from the Corbusier collection of Fort Grant, which will appear in my book, VERDE TO SAN CARLOS, now in the process of publication. (Dale Stuart King, Tucson.)

Wm. T. Corbusier Long Beach, California

NAVAJOS ARE “PEOPLE”:

Your August edition has been carefully examined by our school personnel here. We want to thank you for your continued projection of the Navajo as a dignified and individualistic human, capable of overcoming his immense obstacles in reaching self sufficiency.

As you may know, the Rough Rock Demonstration School is experimenting in community involvement. Basic to this is our underlying principle that every individual has the right to make decisions the “right to be wrong” as our Director of the last two years often says.

We attempt to reach our pupils, both children and adults, through stimulating their pride. We believe that they cannot achieve the best possible for them by abandoning their culture. Such attempts in the past have led to failure, because the Indian lost his identity as an Indian and yet failed to adequately accept the white man's culture. This school believes that the Navajos should be proud of being Navajos, and your August edition has created great interest among the Navajos. One young art student is now painting a mural from the inspiration he received from this issue of ARIZONA HIGHWAYS. Our library copies disappeared immediately and thus are now circulating among the Navajo camps. The same thing happened to our copies of The Treasury of Arizona's Colorful Indians.

YOURS SINCERELY

There are a lot of exciting experiments in education in Arizona. We suggest that education in general is an appealing and picturesque subject, and because of the immensity of the Indian's problems here, we believe that RRDS is the most important “happening” in Apache County.

I wish to convey the thanks of the Navajo people to you for letting them “see themselves.” Mrs. Ruth Flint, Librarian-teacher, Rough Rock School, Chinle, Arizona 86503

FAREWELL TO TAIWAN:

For a thrill of pride in our own Beautiful America, your magazine has for years brought this delight to my heart. I have visited your lovely state several times and found new joy each time.

After more than forty years in China as a missionary, the time to retire has come and I have reluctantly shared my copies of ARIZONA HIGHWAYS with two schools for American dependents' children and with three universities for Chinese, instead of bringing them home with me. In this way I hope a new appreciation of God's handiwork in Nature will be developed and People to People cooperation be strengthened. May the future of your excellent magazine be even brighter than the flowers that grace its pages!

Pearl Johnson, Chiayi, Taiwan

OPPOSITE PAGE

“NOVEMBER DAY ALONG THE VERDE” BY FRANCIS LIGHTNER. Photograph was taken on a bright, sunny day in late November of last year ten miles north of Fort McDowell, northeast of Scottsdale, along the Verde River where it winds its way through the foothills of the McDowell Mountains, in the background. Several days before photo was taken this area received heavy rains. (Record moisture was recorded throughout Arizona during November-December, 1967, truly a “wet” year in the state.) Great white clouds, loitering after the storm had moved on, embellish the scene. Late autumn's touch shows up in the few scattered willows along the river's edge. 4x5 Crown Graphic; Ektachrome E3; f/22 at 1/50 sec., 135mm Xenar lens; Weston Meter reading 400.

BACK COVER

“A SIGHT TO GLADDEN EYES AND HEARTS OF DESERT DWELLERS” BY EARL PETROFF. Rain in the desert is always a sight to delight those who live in the desert or those who come as desert visitors. (It has often happened that “visitors” soon become “dwellers”.) The arid land responds gratefully to the generosity of Nature, usually not too generous in desert areas with gifts of welcome rainfall. Photograph was taken along Shea Blvd., a new, scenic thoroughfare that traverses the desert between Scottsdale Road and Arizona 87, about 15 miles northeast of Scottsdale. 4x5 Graphic View II; Ektachrome; f/22 at 1/25 sec., 12-inch Convertible lens; Dec. 15, 1967; late afternoon with sky heavy with storm clouds punctured briefly with shafts of sunlight; Lunasix meter reading 191/2.